An under-investigated issue which nevertheless recurs as a subject of research or anyway of papers, is that of fun. It is important in HCI as underpinning the design of games. It also recurs in education as a possibly important mode of promoting learning. It is certainly true that we cannot account for some user behaviour with machines without allowing for fun.
Possibly related to the concept of "fun" are those of humour, play, and interesting-ness. The latter is of crucial importance in information retrieval. Although one use of the WWW (and newspapers, magazines, TV, ....) is to satisfy specific information goals (e.g. find all the documents mentioning HCI and fun), in reality probably about the same amount of user time goes into undefined goals where the user reacts to things that look interesting to them, but which they could not have told you they were looking for until they saw them. The design of newspapers, magazines, and museums is also largely about trying to satisfy this undefined goal of "being interesting".
This meeting will be a discussion about these topics in relation to HCI and IR, in which participants will pool what they know that might be relevant. If you definitely have a chunk (5 mins is the right size) you want to present, let us know.
For more information about this talk contact: johnson@dcs.gla.ac.uk